Researchers study how a traditional Chinese mushroom helps cancer patients strengthen their immune systems in a $5.4 million investigation.

It’s been brewed for thousands of years as a Chinese medicinal tea. Now Bastyr University researchers are closer to discovering whether the turkey tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor / Coriolus versicolor) can help cancer patients boost their immune systems during chemotherapy.

Turkey tail, named for its colorful stripes, is the humble fungus at the center of a $5.4 million collaboration between Bastyr, the University of Washington and others, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The mushroom grows widely in forests around the world, but its health potential has never been fully measured in scientific trials.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved a clinical trial for a turkey tail extract, allowing patients with advanced prostate cancer to take it in combination with conventional chemotherapy. Another trial pending FDA approval will test the effects of taking the extract along with a vaccine treatment in women with breast cancer. These will help researchers gather safety data and continue their development of potentially transformative cancer therapy.

“We didn’t discover turkey tail,” says lead investigator Leanna J. Standish, PhD, ND, LAc, FABNO, medical director of the Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research Center. “It’s been used in Asia for thousands and thousands of years, and it turns out to be a really potent immune therapy. The significance, I think, is that we’re bringing a new medicine to cancer patients in the U.S.”

Previous research by Bastyr and the University of Minnesota found a turkey tail supplement may support conventional breast cancer therapies by strengthening a patient’s immune system. That study was published recently in the peer-reviewed journal ISRN Oncology.

Now that researchers have approval from the FDA, they plan to begin prostate cancer clinical trials in early 2013. The ultimate goal is to develop a cancer therapy without the debilitating side effects of pharmaceutical drugs.

“One of the things chemotherapy does is suppress the immune system, so our question is whether patients taking the extract can maintain healthier immune function,” says Masa Sasagawa, ND, a senior project manager at the Bastyr University Research Institute.

Strengthening Immunity

Study participants recruited at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance will take oral doses of a Japanese turkey tail extract along with docetaxel chemotherapy. Others will take a placebo and chemotherapy. Along with determining safety, lab researchers will measure the levels and activity of natural killer (NK) cells and other immune cells, which protect the body from tumors and viruses. NK cell counts and activity typically plummet after chemotherapy, leaving the body vulnerable to new diseases.

“Our hope is that docetaxel plus the turkey tail extract can create a strong enough immune response to lead to significant tumor regression,” says lead investigator Cynthia A. Wenner, PhD, a Bastyr research associate professor. “That’s what happened in our previous mouse trial.”

Participants in the breast cancer study will also take a cancer vaccine under development.

Nature’s Complexity

Bastyr University Researchers Masa Sasagawa, ND, and Cynthia Wenner, PhD, are helping lead a $5.4 million collaboration on the immune-boosting potential of PSK, a mushroom derivative.

Gaining FDA approval — required for federally funded clinical trials — proved challenging because of the complexity of a natural product. Unlike a synthetic drug, a mushroom contains thousands of elements, each with a potential effect on the immune system.

“The FDA wants to know what the ‘mechanism of action’ is,” says Dr. Sasagawa. “But it’s very difficult to determine, because turkey tail is a natural product and not a single compound.”

More challenges: Natural products vary slightly from harvest to harvest, in the same way wines from the same vineyard vary year to year. Precise research requires consistency. Also, mushrooms grown in contaminated soil collect toxins and heavy metals, making safety a concern.

To search for consistency and safety, the research team looked to a pharmaceutical-grade turkey tail product made in Japan, where turkey tail has been a widely used cancer treatment for more than 30 years. They found a solution in protein-bound polysaccharide K (PSK), a powdered turkey tail derivative produced in Japan using a hot-water extraction method.

Turkey tail’s traditional use means derivatives are probably not patentable, which has dissuaded pharmaceutical companies from funding clinical trials. It’s a research dilemma that NIH seeks to address through its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). NCCAM has helped fund research, such as the Bastyr/UW collaboration, that integrates traditional naturopathic medicine with modern empirical standards.

“There is a lot of knowledge accumulated by naturopathic doctors over the years, and with the help of NCCAM we’ve been able to investigate howsome of these medicines operate,” says Mark Martzen, PhD, CIP, senior director of research development at Bastyr. “It’s given us critical insight into how things work at the molecular level.”

In 2010 NCCAM awarded the $5.4 million grant, known formally as the U19 Bastyr/UW Oncomycology Translational Research Center. A portion of the funding has allowed Bastyr to offer research training to students. Naturopathic medicine student Joshua Goldenberg published turkey tail-related research in the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Naturopathic medicine student Katie Strobe won a $24,000 scholarship for her work on PSK immune responses.

Mushroom-Human Relations

Finding a disease-fighting agent growing on trees, stumps and fallen logs may sound unlikely. But it wouldn’t have surprised our ancestors, who relied on plants for their health-giving properties. Mushrooms were particularly important, says Dr. Standish.

“They’re incredibly important as nutrition and also medicine,” she says. “Humans co-evolved with mushrooms. They are probably far more important in our biology than we imagine. North America is kind of fungi-phobic, and it may be contributing to our lousy health.”

Dr. Standish believes the modern focus on disease-fighting drugs will ultimately give way to a return of plant-based medicine.

“The difference between natural medicine and conventional medicine is the dependence of conventional medicine on the single-molecule approach,” she says. “Drugs are typically very potent, but quite deadly in the end, because nature doesn’t work like that.

“Natural products have multiple mechanisms of action, and it is very difficult scientifically to figure out all those mechanisms. But our bodies have evolved to rely on them.”

Bringing clarity to time-tested but little-understood medicines requires combining traditional wisdom and modern science, says Hailing Lu, MD, PhD, research assistant professor of oncology at UW. That’s the point of the turkey tail study.

“We’re excited about this,” Dr. Lu said recently. “Japan and many other Asian countries have been using this [mushroom extract] for a long time. For me, it’s a great combination. I come from China, so the use of herbal products is not new for me. This is a bridging of Eastern and Western medicine.”

Extensive background about Coriolus versicolor and its PSP compound can be found here.

A QUT research team has discovered that two naturally occurring compounds, one from mushrooms and the other from palm oil, when used together can significantly reduce the growth of tumours in prostate cancer models.

Dr Patrick Ling from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation and the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre-Queensland said the two compounds induced a drastic activation of the cancer fighting protein, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK).

“AMPK is a key player in suppressing cancer cell growth – and the mushroom compound works together with the Vitamin E to activate AMPK to much higher levels,” said Dr Ling, who is based at Brisbane’s Translational Research Institute.

Dr Ling’s previous research confirmed that the compound, polysaccharopeptide (PSP), found in the turkey tail mushroom, or yunzhi as it’s known in China, prevented prostate cancer development in pre-clinical investigations.

“In China people have put the mushroom in soups to boost health and immunity for millennia and in the past few decades have been studying its effects on cancer,” he said.

“We then studied the effects on prostate cancer cells of a form of natural Vitamin E called gamma-tocotrienol or gamma-T3 which is extracted from palm oil.

“There has been interest in gamma-T3 for the past 20 years and a rapid increase in research on its anti-cancer effects for the past five years.

“This natural form of gamma T-3, which can also be extracted from rice bran oil is much more potent than the synthetic form at reducing cancer cell growth.”

Dr Ling said the team’s latest research also indicated that PSP actually sensitised the cancer cells to gamma-t3 cytotoxicity in prostate cancer models

He said the two compounds’ synergistic effect could potentially enhance chemotherapy and mitigate its side effects.

Extensive background about Coriolus versicolor and its PSP compound can be found here.

The Coriolus Versicolor, growing on dead wood. Its mycelium has very powerful therapeutic properties

More proof that the Coriolus Versicolor and its main therapeutic component are worth considering when battling cancer and the side effects of the common treatments.

Led by, Dorothy Cimino Brown from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, the researchers said the ‘promising findings’ offer hope that the compound may one day offer cancer patients — human and canine alike — a viable new ally in the battle against cancer.

“There have been a series of studies looking at groups of people with cancer,” Cimino Brown said. “The issue with those studies is that they weren’t necessarily measuring what most people would think is the most clinically important result, which is, do people taking PSP live longer?”

Based on the ultimate endpoints of how quickly the tumors progressed and how long dogs suffering from a natural form of cancer survived when given the supplement, the research team suggests that PSP supplementation may be effective in fighting the tumors.

“We were shocked,” Cimino Brown said. “Prior to this, the longest reported median survival time of dogs with hemangiosarcoma of the spleen that underwent no further treatment was 86 days. We had dogs that lived beyond a year with nothing other than this mushroom as treatment.”

Dog study

To address this critical question, Cimino Brown and her team began research in dogs suffering from naturally occurring hemangiosarcoma (an aggressive, invasive cancer that arises from the blood cells and typically affects the spleen.)

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The results of the researchers’ trial suggest that the PSP supplement was effectively fighting the tumors.

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Introduction to Chaga tea

Supports your immune system

Balances your metabolism

Re-vitalizes, enhances your concentration

High in anti-oxidants, anti-aging power

Chaga tea does not have the potency of a highly concentrated extract. But sometimes you don’t need that amount of power. Or maybe you just prefer to drink a healthy herbal tea during the day instead of popping capsules. Chaga tea is an excellent prophylactic.

In most countries, tea is made by steeping tea leaves in hot water until the brew reaches the desired strength. However, in Russia, a lot of tea leaves are steeped in little water to create a powerful, highly concentrated brew called zavarka(заварка), which often will be simmering all day. This brew is then diluted with hot water to taste when it is served.

The traditional samovar was designed to do just this: on the top there was a tea pot with brewing tea (zavarka), and inside was hot water, with a little tap to dilute your cup of zavarka to the desired strength. See the picture, below.

This is an excellent way to prepare a really potent Chaga tea – in fact, you are performing a hot-water extraction this way, setting the active components free (beta-glucans, phenols) and thus increasing the therapeutic potency.

Chaga tea, when put in a filter bag, can be used a few times before losing its flavor if you choose the short (15 – 30 min. of steeping) method.

Russians also enjoy mixing different types of tea – for example, black tea with herbal tea. You can do the same with Chaga tea. You can also add small amounts of cinnamon, kardamom or nutmeg to vary the taste – feel free to experiment! Some mix it with instant-coffee (ratio 1:1) or drip-coffee. There are also people that put Chaga in an espresso-machine!

For sweeteners, Russians use sugar, honey, or even jam. Instead of dissolving sugar into the tea, some Russian tea drinkers prefer to hold a sugar cube in their mouths as they drink – a recipe for tooth decay, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

More background on Chaga and other medicinal mushrooms can be found, free for download, here.